City may be safer, but at public housing developments crime is up

While New York City has become generally safer this year, crime went up in the city’s public-housing developments, according to a report released Thursday which also shed light on the effectiveness of a de Blasio administration public housing safety effort.

A study by Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank, showed that crime across New York City Housing Authority’s 328 developments has increased over the first five months of the same time last year. Burglaries rose 26%, while rapes increased by 24% and felony assaults were up 11%. The gains were part of a trend that began in 2006.

"Relative to the rest of the city, in other words, New York’s public-housing projects are more dangerous now than they were a decade ago," the report said. "As crime continues to fall in the city as a whole this year but continues to rise within NYCHA, this gap grows wider."

According to the report, crime at 15 public-housing developments, which were targeted for safety measures by the de Blasio administration in 2014, accounted for 17% of all the crime in NYCHA housing, about the same as last year, indicating that the mayor's efforts have stalled. Two years ago, when the program started they accounted for 20%.

On a positive note, shootings in the 15 developments fell by 43% from the same period last year. There was a 15.2% decline in shootings at all NYCHA developments during the first six months of the year from a year earlier, according to the New York Police Department.

Meanwhile, reported domestic violence incidents at the 15 properties were up by 23% compared to last year, according to the Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice. But the office attributed the increase to an uptick in residents reporting the crime in response to the mayoral program—and not necessarily an actual increase in incidents. If the domestic violence statistics are taken out, the office said, violent crime would be down 4% compared to last year.

In the final paragraphs of the report, the Manhattan Institute made the case for possibly increasing a controversial program called stop-question-and-frisk at city public-housing projects. The de Blasio administration is opposed to the practice, and has continued to curtail its use since 2014.

City Hall has repeatedly defended another controversial practice called quality-of-life policing, which is based on the theory that arrests for low-level crimes would deter more serious felonies. The Department of Investigation released Tuesday a study indicating that these arrests, which are concentrated in police precincts home to larger concentrations of NYCHA projects and minorities, do not reduce felonies.

The Manhattan Institute report came out the same day that the City Council held a hearing regarding a host of NYCHA-related bills that would require the beleaguered housing agency to report its efforts to place residents into jobs.

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